Monthly Archives: December 2017

My friend and occasional co-author Matt Wedel is finding it hard to make time to write paleontology papers, in among all the administrative responsibilities that have accumulated as he’s become more senior at his university. He observed: “I need to recultivate the ability to Just Say No when it’s time to do paleo.”

This is an example of an important and pervasive problem: whatever is most important to us becomes — for that very reason — a kind of background-radiation thing that we do whenever we’re not doing something more urgent. But what that often means in practice that everything else is more urgent, and we paradoxically neglect the thing that is most important.

In deference to those who found it puzzling that The Last Jedi didn’t give us more on The Force Awakens‘ Big Bad, I concede that we’re entitled to wonder whether Snoke was a Sith, and if so, how he fits into the always-two-there-are model. One might profitably muse on whether Sith-ness is in fact constrained to the always-two-there-are model, or whether that was just a story Plagueis/Palpatine, Palpatine/Dooku, then Palpatine/Vader told to make themselves feel special.

What I don’t concede is that the film has to explore that. I rather think we’ll have more fun speculating on such things ourselves that we would get from being told the what The Answer is. Because whatever The Answer turns out to be, the only possible response will be “oh”.

With the whole family, I saw The Last Jedi at the one-minute-after-midnight showing on the day of release, at the wonderful Cinderford Palace Cinema (£2.50 on weekdays, £3.50 at weekends, snacks £1). I loved it and I’m keen to see it again. Almost everything I want to say about it, Matt Wedel has already said in his review over on Echo Station 5-7.